Oh the Places you'll Go.. but whatever you do please don't drive...

       I  just wanted to talk a little bit today about sending your kids off to college and the great unknown. It's got to be such an emotional time. My sister and I were having a conversation last night about how when your kids are little it can physically exhausting, so back to school day gives you a  little thrill and then when they become teenagers and hopefully they aren't  emotionally exhausting you this week, sending them to school isn't as fun, you want summer to hang on. Of course you may be ready to put on a pencil skirt and smoke a few cigarettes while drinking a strong gin martini who knows.. .the hormonal roller coaster with the teen is mysterious, we've all been there.

    I've recently been slapped in the face with the not so irrational fear of Mariama and Holly learning to drive. ( in a year and a half, but it's there...) Just knowing that I manage the day to day traffic some days  with more road rage than others and having them drive around Nashville, which lets face it America is one of the best towns in the whole U.S. of A. but we're not going to be on any Best drivers in America lists... for real.

It makes sense why my dad acted like a crazed maniac when I learned to drive because I just wanted to go everywhere at all times, day or night, in a Mazda RX7 no doubt. Those of you under the age of thirty might want to google that cool ride. It really really was..Even though I'd learned to drive in a truck named Lurch, years before I ever got my license, and Lurch wasn't an automatic. And I'm pretty sure I was ten when I first took that ride across the pasture. 

I guess you balance out the fear by knowing that you won't have to be a taxi service anymore. 

My friend Elizabeth had a video online of her wearing a crash helmet as her son pulls away in the drivers seat. One of funniest thing I've ever seen. 

Meanwhile, this is Helen. She's already mastered the art of driving and is going off to the University of Richmond in the fall.  Whenever I shoot Seniors I always think to myself, this is about to be one of the coolest times in your whole life. A real highlight. Here you'll find some friends that you can hold onto forever. Here you're going to be truly conscious for the first time. So relish it. Because the next time you come up for air is going to be around your 35th birthday when you go.. Oh.. okay. at least from a woman's perspective. Guys have their own thing going on. I'm still trying to get Shawn to remember what grade our kids are in. I jest.. .sort of..